Category: environment

Great Americans # 9 Singer Songwriter Steve Young

Steve Young is one of my alltime favorite singer songwriters.

I predict that, long term, this glorious artist will be more famous than his namesake, the great ’49ers quarterback, whom nfl.com ranks as the 15th greatest quarterback of all time. Others put the football playing Steve Young in the top ten of quarterbacks.

At the moment the footballer is much more famous than the singer, whose birthday is coming up on the 12th of July.

Who wants to help me bridge the current gap in fame between these two men?

For those who know little about the singer, please listen to “My Oklahoma” written by Young’s wife, Terrye Newkirk, aka Cheryl Young.

The lyrics are gloriously free American words about being as one with the place you live in:

“Stars out in the morning
And the still rustle of corn
What a good place to be born

Clouds over the prairie
Till the wind blows them away
At the still start of the day

Hey, my Oklahoma
Are you still awaiting for me
With your gold plain waving free”

In “The Ballad Of William Sycamore” Young makes a song out of a Steven Vincent Benét poem in which the spirit of a man, hit hard by the loss of his sons in American wars at the Alamo and under Custer, finds redemption in reuniting with the land:

"Now I lie in the heart of the fat, black soil, Like the seed of the prairie-thistle; It has washed my bones with honey and oil And picked them clean as a whistle.

And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring, And my sons, like the wild-geese flying; And I lie and hear the meadow-lark sing And have much content in my dying.

Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my buffalo have found me."

In “Vison of A Child” , a song written for his son, Jubal, Young again finds union between the imagination and the natural world in lyrics like:

“Little Jubal boy
The woods and fields are dark
Except for the light of the moon and stars
So go on ahead
Through the portals of your dreams
Go on escape these earthly bars
And you can sail the silver streams
As you travel through your dreams
As you travel through the night”

A glorious voice.

For me, a great American.

Steve Young.

The singer.

Geoff Fox, 25th May, 2023, Down Under

IWOTA # 4 – Mrs Patrick Campbell

Mrs Patrick Campbell, died on this date in 1940.

An accomplished indigenous woman of the Anglosphere.

A Grand Dame of English and American Theater.

Her marriage to her first husband lasted five years till 1900, but his name survives as her married woman’s stage name to this very day.

She was very successful on London’s West end as Ophelia, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Mrs Pat had a physically unconsummated love affair by letter with George Bernard Shaw. She wrote to him: “Oh dear me — it’s too late to do anything but accept you and love you — but when you were quite a little boy, somebody ought to have said “HUSH” just once!”

Shaw wrote Pygmalion for her. It was Shaw’s most popular play and the inspiration for My Fair Lady. All though many people considered Campbell too old for the role, she triumphed in 1914 at the age of 49 and again in 1920 when 55 years old.

She was a regular performer in American theatre from her Broadway debut in 1900 till the age of 68 when she moved on to working briefly in movies. This included co-starring with Norma Shearer in “Riptide” and with Peter Lorre in “Crime And Punishment”.

What a woman !

Geoff Fox, 9th April, 2023, Australia

Huck Finn Week – Day 2 – At Home With Trees

“THE sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight o’clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there. A couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly. ” Huck Finn on Jackson’s Island

Geoff Fox, 6th December, 2022

Snacking Gone Mad

Melbourne artist Eddy Burger knows my story.

This old friend of mine also knows a lot about moral and immoral forces which buffet us all.

In this drawing by Eddy (with words added by me), I see an image of how life giving purity can be vulnerable to monstrous cruelty .

I see what governments at their worst can do to individuals focussed on life and what life needs.

It doesnt have to be that way, but sadly sometimes it is.

Geoff Fox, 25th October, 2020, Terra Nullius